It was shortly after Boris Johnson won his landside majority that his aides first began plotting to oust him. That isn’t some mad conspiracy theory, but recorded fact. Dominic Cummings told the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg in 2021 that he started discussing options for replacing his boss within “days not months” of the election. Now the Covid inquiry has unearthed his contemptuous WhatsApps, Nadine Dorries’s contention that Cummings seemed to consider himself in charge, and surreptitiously texted colleagues “what the fuck is this clown on about?” as Johnson spoke in meetings, seems reasonably plausible.
She’s right, too, that Rishi Sunak’s well-planned leadership campaign didn’t magically come together overnight, that Westminster has its share of sociopaths who seemingly enjoy manipulating others, and that some players become so addicted to the game they forget it’s real life to everyone else. Her horrific account of the way women raped by MPs were allegedly treated by Conservative whips tallies, meanwhile, with bleak stories of assaults hushed up or weaponised for political gain that are already in the public domain, though one hopes these victims were warned before their anonymised stories were published. The big picture, then, feels roughly right. Some small details, such as the “algorithm-distorted” new MPs constantly panicking about Twitter or the way colleagues seem scratchier post-Brexit, are also shrewdly observed. So why, then, does this eye-poppingly extraordinary book somehow fail to ring true?
It could be the naming of characters after Bond villains – the mysterious unelected Conservative fixer about whom she has collected so many spectacularly libellous-sounding stories that he cannot be named is dubbed “Dr No”. Or even the way Dorries, a woman far sharper than critics suggest, casts herself for narrative purposes as a political ingenue, roaming Westminster asking impossibly wide-eyed questions as she tries to establish who killed Boris Johnson’s career. Eventually, our amateur sleuth discovers it’s … Rebekah Vardy’s account! Just kidding: apparently it’s a sinister cabal called “the movement” comprising Cummings, Michael Gove, spin doctor turned BBC executive Robbie Gibb and various lesser-known apparatchiks who have “set out to control the destiny of the Conservative party” for 25 years. And that’s where the story falls apart.
While it’s true, as Iain Duncan Smith tells Dorries, that some of these people were involved in his bitter ousting back in the 00s, so was half the Conservative parliamentary party. To claim this loose and ideologically disparate clique has been secretly calling the shots ever since, arbitrarily installing and dispatching Tory leaders for no particular ideological reason and by methods unclear, is to make the classic conspiracy theorist’s mistake of superimposing orderly design on chaos. Worse still, by repeatedly adding two and two but getting 666, Dorries risks reinforcing every paranoid fantasy about shadowy elites secretly running everything that has ever existed, alongside the nihilistic message that your vote doesn’t matter because the game’s always rigged. By the time someone claims the real plan was to make Rishi Sunak leader, lose the election and let Labour reverse Brexit before winning again, the reader can’t help feeling that everyone involved needs a lie down.
While she’s right to see something deeply undemocratic in Cameron, May, Johnson and Truss all departing office without the voters getting a say, Dorries omits to explore Johnson’s own starring role in kneecapping the first two. Does the movement control him too? Could he be Dr No? Makes you think.
The interviews with Johnson himself that punctuate the book are genuinely intriguing, and not just for Dorries’s ability to somehow capture him sounding more thoughtful and statesmanlike than any previous interviewer. They’re interspersed with long, dramatic conversations between Dorries and various unnamed sources who all seemingly share her thesis, several of whom have a habit of speaking like characters in a bad spy novel. The one codenamed Moneypenny, who she hints could be a spook, fascinated me. Over the years, I’ve admittedly met only a handful of MI5 or MI6 types, but none said things like “for the first time ever, there is a man waiting in the wings who is connected to the money network of the world, and of course they hate it when the plan doesn’t go to plan”. You long for a proper explanation of how Johnson managed to hire so many people who hated him, or even why they hated him so much if he really was the man Dorries describes. Instead, we get Moneypenny’s analysis that Johnson never realised what the plotters were doing because “it’s the big picture for him, always … he was obsessed about delivering on his manifesto promises”, which suggests she isn’t destined for a long intelligence career.
Yet intermittently, there’s a glimpse of what could have been: an inside story, told by someone who never lost the feeling of being an outsider. “You guys, you think it’s fucking acceptable, that your little world is more important than any world anyone else works in, and you wonder why the public hate MPs,” says one source, ranting bitterly against the dark arts, and you think; that’s it, that’s the story. Then it melts back into the shadows, and is gone.
• The Plot: The Political Assassination of Boris Johnson by Nadine Dorries is published by HarperCollins (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
